About the Statues
by poincare
Summary: /She'd never had much of a rulebook./    A series of what you guys here seem to call ficlets/character explorations/oneshots. 2 'chapters' up so far. Please read and review- I'm new here.
1. Chapter 1

Sometimes, in the hours before the dawn, she'd stand at the window. The city would be recovering from a nocturnal wave of bustle and dizziness, she thought- there was, every fifteen minutes, a car that ambled past, lazily, and there was rarely a person to be seen. But then, some miles away, someone'd been stabbed. She'd know. Someone couldn't breathe; someone was numb, someone else was hollow. She knew that better. And so she concluded sometimes that in the spaces between streets- the buildings, the alleys, the curbs- there was no rest and no recovery. Hell, she never really had any herself.

The window shifted the light like a statue in an exhibit adjacent to her own. She watched it.

Her chest throbbed sometimes. In the vicinity of the pain she felt alive; in the pain she felt empty. The wound still hadn't quite scarred. Where her breasts parted, there was a confusion of skin, and therein a compulsion to sob, to hurt, to reach forward, but nevertheless to maintain a self-serving silence. It was then that she'd remember Kiev- cursory and indulgent, the loss of her virginity an oddly proximitous adventure. She'd think fleetingly of Josh, of, within the parenthesis of their former relationship, their erratically spaced meetings and the distance of their attempts at closeness. She thought of Castle. And then it would come back to this- she was hurt. If he'd been hurt, she couldn't have allowed it. He did not want to hurt her- he would not try to hurt her. That was something only she was capable of doing. Whenever his confession threatened to spill over into a background noise, something capable of driving her compulsion to the explosive, she'd hide from it. He would not hurt her- there it was again. He'd have taken a bullet for her. She thought that she would have for him as well, but only because she couldn't bear the thought of anything happening to him. She couldn't say that she would have with absolute certainty.

So there was guilt. Most of it blended into the chaos- like the sniper, she observed- but whatever amount of it didn't she channeled into the method of her apology. She allowed herself a greater comfort around Castle- she allowed herself and Castle the majority of the easiness of a very close friendship. He was, to her, Castle, even in the chaos, but only where it did not border on spilling into a void. The thing was that the void lay by his confession. _I love you,_ he'd said. She supposed she'd known it, but sometimes she hadn't an idea what it really meant. Sometimes, when she was half asleep, she remembered, nebulously, saying it back; and then, when she awoke, she thought of it and, after the panic had passed and she'd acknowledged the sheer, feverish immediacy of the line over which the scar on her chest lay, remarked to herself that it would have pointless to have said it. What was the need to break both of them, inch by inch, trapped in the spaces whose existence she wouldn't admit?

She smiled when he gave her coffee. She thought that maybe this was it and they were in a relationship, albeit an untraditional one. He cared and she cared. If she dared to consider _them _a separate entity, maybe they'd become one. In Kiev, she'd allowed herself a certain hopeful carelessness that now was no longer existent. She imagined that if she held Castle's hand for ten seconds, an echo of it might return fleetingly. With Josh she'd hidden from the truth of that; with Josh there were only spaces. She acknowledged this briefly, a little less fleetingly than the echo might have been.

The day's victim was a man in a tux- stained red now. Found near Lexington and 30th in an alley, stabbed, no ID. (It was odd how, after all these years, the blood somewhat subtracted itself from her eyesight). No guns involved, Lanie reassured her. She feigned nonchalance- she couldn't protect anyone else from something if she was afraid of it herself. Castle could spin the scene as something thrilling, as if to mock the present devastation. There was something nice yet horrible about it, she thought. She gripped her gun at her belt suddenly, like a reclusive comfort. The weapon could be both overestimated and underestimated; she'd done both. One flinch of her finger and breath became something finite. They were all hanging on such loosely spun threads, weren't they. The air could be filled with drifting and falling crosshairs and she wouldn't know- no one would. That was a decent reason to be impulsive- their breaths were suspended beneath scissors. But death wasn't the greatest horror- she knew this the best. It was the haunted interiors that were, and she was convinced that impulses were no more than a shortcut to the throes of it.

She imagined him writing the scene, later, when he'd returned home- subtle complexity of grief spilt onto the page, but never dripping off of it. She'd always thought that he'd never fathomed the numbness and horror of grief, but she knew that he'd fathomed hers. She knew, subconsciously, that it'd hurt him. And so that was when part of her had begun to hide from herself, and another part of her had stepped, slightly, toward him.

It wasn't that she'd never desired a certain proximity with him- the itch sometimes burned her alive in her room, the aftermath leaving her sometimes with a fear of what exactly she was capable of doing to herself. So on the nights when she couldn't fathom herself, on the nights that she could not confront it, she'd opt for a book, read a line that sometimes kept her afloat. It wasn't in the intended storyline, she knew, but it was certainly part of one.

_To the extraordinary KB. _

This is how she would conduct a maintenance of how she felt, she suspected, with his words on pages that neither of them dared read aloud.


	2. Chapter 2

"So," he asked, "how much do you remember?"

Too much, she thought. "Everything."

She was very suddenly cognizant of his eyes. She buried her hands in her hair and focused on the ground.

"Tell me."

She looked up, a fresh sweat breaking onto her forehead. "What exactly am I supposed to tell you?"

She remembered it, of course. All of it. She'd tried to make it exist in a state of unsurety minutes after she'd woken up, tried to convince herself that whatever she remembered was faulty, since she very well could have hallucinated it. But she knew that she was remembering it right without a doubt, really- there was a quality too raw to the echo of her senses to dismiss it as anything but.

"I don't think I really have much of a rulebook." she'd said in the last session. What'd she mean, he'd asked. She'd thought that it was obvious. Her panicking at the thought of Castle at gunpoint, her thinking that she didn't want to tell him things only when she thought he was about to die, her reserving herself to a simple _I'm glad you're okay. _Her working furiously to find the third cop, her forgiving Montgomery. Nothing was straightforward. So, she hadn't said anything.

"Tell me what you remember the most."

"Castle." she said. Her throat went dry. "He… he sort of barreled me down. He wanted to take the shot for me."

Dr. Burke looked her square in the eye. "You've already told me that."

"I have." It was more an affirmation than a question. She wasn't going to get anywhere doing this to herself, she decided- standing still, misleading herself, everyone. A tragedy was more interesting than something without a story.

"He sort of… he held me. And he told me to stay with him. And I tried, and I thought that after all this, he was still there. And he didn't have to be, but he just- he still was. And my eyes… hurt."

"Your eyes hurt?"

"I was trying so hard to look at him. To tell him that… I was still there, that he didn't have to do _this._ What we always did."

"And what's that?"

"Me lov- me manifesting my caring for him through... some sort of private panic. Him doing ten times what I've ever done for anyone I've… " Words, words. "Cared for."

"And then?"

This was the part that she'd tried to force herself to think she'd hallucinated- the part that she'd remember every morning, the part that she'd passed out hearing over and over. But she told him anyhow.

Words- _words_.

"Castle. He said that he loved me."

There was a pregnant silence. She remembered the pain flooding her. She remembered thinking that no, this wasn't her. How could any one person be in so much pain? You could love anything- not pain, though. Not that pain.

But, she thought, you could feel pain and not mind it. Not if you were feeling it in the place of someone you-

"And how do you feel about Castle?"

She paused for some seconds. "It scares me sometimes." she said finally. "How many bullets I'd take for him."

* * *

><p><em>before: <em>The sky was too white. She'd thought that nothing was constant- nothing at all. Blue was white- white was red. She couldn't remember much of anything. Maybe this was how it ended- fractured. (Maybe it'd begun like that.)

She could hear her own voice. _I could use a silver lining right about now. _She wanted to write the final sentence, to assure herself that something was caught in whatever chase had ever existed. There was some perfect portrait in every well written story- that of a girl waving at a ship that disappeared into the distance, that of two lovers drowning together. _Together. _Here they were, together. Perhaps they'd always been and that was them, their portrait. She wanted to reach for cheek, tell him that she loved him too, though she hadn't an idea what it meant. She'd never really known what it meant, only that when you did, there came about a certain token of unrelenting irreplaceability, a certain inability to breathe, to be ignorant. It didn't matter really. This was how it ended- with him believing that he'd chased an unmoving thing. She wanted to tell him that she'd been closing the distance the whole time, that she was broken and wanted to hide, but to hide somewhere within him. That she was much, much, much more than grateful.

The sun bled. Nothing had ever seemed so jilted.

* * *

><p><em>perhaps, later: <em>

The suspect might have held the blade to his throat. She might have seen them at the last moment- before it was too late.

The panic might have risen in her, freshly. The tears might have evaded her throat and boiled her eyelids. She might have shot down the suspect, then rushed to him, crashed into him. Her arms might have clutched nothing else. The pulsating panic might have burnt her throat. She might have done twice what was required only to make certain he was _there_.

"In my nightmares," she might have said later, "you're frozen in pain. Or just hollow. Empty."

She would have endured an hour of numbness herself first. That was how it was with her- feeling was a conserved thing. She'd have retreated with a cup of coffee, watched him recover and be debriefed by the Captain from a distance. Pictured herself standing over something that resembled him but in which he wasn't there, something that lay motionless and stared with eyes that didn't see. Thought that pain might swallow her until she was nothing but a searing sound. Assured herself that she was tired of walking in circles- feeling unabashedly only when it was a crime not to, panicking and then, later, when it'd passed, pretending, pretending, pretending. Knew that he was somehow always there. Questioned what'd happen if he wasn't, very suddenly. Remembered that without love, there weren't nightmares.

" I don't want to tell you things when _you're_ not here." she might have said. "I think we should stop running when we know there's still time."

And their palms might have beat together in some asymmetric rhythm, together creating an incessant pulse. And they were there, then. Always, always.

* * *

><p><em>perhaps, later: <em>They coalesced in their lovemaking. She lay back and he kissed her- carefully, relentlessly.

He pressed the back of his palm to the line of her breast to make certain that something still beat there, and then to the scar, just a centimeter to the left of it. The scar. She was alive. _Kate_. He pressed his lips to the flush of skin there, kissed it softly, urgently. _Kate._ Alive, here. _Kate, Kate, Kate_.

She took his face in her palms and met his lips with her own, until her breath was his and whatever consciousness each of them had, shared.


End file.
